Ode on a Grecian Urn, a poem they published 15 years ago about a crazed southern biker named Billy the Reb, who rode straight into traffic flying a Confederate flag on a bet for another biker's 'scoot and four grams of toot and. The magazine is a little tamer than it used to be: I remember, the way others might recall This month's shrink-wrapped issue, which contains a bonus 'Buyer's Guide' to everything from forks to fenders to rocker boxes, is as adamantly australopithecine as always, devoted to its no-fault policy of topless chicks, custom bikes, and guides to the ultimate drag races, runs and mechanics of riding. Monde has lost its cachet among civilians - certainly there are no Allen Ginsbergs serenading them and rock stars have long since stopped hiring them as bouncers - Easyriders does not appear to have noticed.

When Toronto's small, foolish mayor shook hands with a Hell's Angel recently - in a wide-eyed, 'What are you rebelling against, Johnny?' manner - he was roundly vilified, by a media no longer absorbed in the passage and purpose of the Wild Ones. The passing of time has also been unkind to the very idea of the biker, who 'Rides to Live Lives to Ride.' Once, an uneasily admired cultural figure, a Byronic hood or Jesse James, who lived on the margins of a society deemed too puritanical to endure, today's bikers are widely considered to be criminals and genuine pariahs. What was once the exclusive arcana of the outlaw became mainstreamed - by the late 1980s, the dude you saw tearing down the street on an Indian Chief, in a spiked helmet and head-to-toe body art was more likely to be a gallery owner than a bad-ass, a confusing phenomenon that defanged all but the affiliated, colours-coded riders. I was wildly in love with a brutish man who drove a chopped Harley Sportster, and liked to absorb myself in the hectic atmosphere of this men's-only publication, fantasizing, on occasion, that I might send in my picture to the 'Old Lady of the Month Contest.'ДЄs time passed, and in the manner of tattoos, serious leather and complex piercings, bikes grew more fashionable. I once read Easyriders - the most popular of all motorcycle magazines - with an avidity other girls reserved for Glamour or Mademoiselle.

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